One of the slaves among the half a dozen waiting at the table was wearing a strange headdress: a triangular plate bolted over her mouth with straps running from both sides and over her head to keep it in place, a great buckle at the back to keep it pressed tight against her mouth and a padlock to fasten the buckle. John found he could hardly drag his eyes away from the mask-like appearance of the woman, the dark, tragic eyes, and then the sharply geometric shape on the mouth.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Sir Henry asked irritably. ‘Oh! Are you looking at Rebecca? She’s been stealing food, haven’t you, Becky? Tasting it as she cooks, dirty bitch. So she’ll have nothing to eat at all for a couple of days, nothing in her mouth but what I put there.’ He gave a shout of laughter and a wink to John at the sexual innuendo. ‘Are you sorry now that you tasted my soup, Becky?’

Silently the woman bowed her head.

‘Good, good,’ Sir Henry said, cheered by the sombre grief of her silence, and waved for another glass of rum and water.

A woman slave escorted John to his bedroom and stood, as still as an obedient dog, at the doorway.

‘You can go,’ John said, careful not to thank her.

‘Sir Henry say you can have me if you want,’ she said in carefully spoken English.

John was taken aback. ‘Er – I don’t –’

‘You want a man?’

‘No!’

She dropped her dark eyes, a world of despair hidden by the downsweep of her lashes. ‘You want a child?’

‘No!’

She waited. ‘What you want to do then?’ she asked wearily, dreading some demand more vile than she had faced before.

‘I want nothing!’ John exclaimed. ‘Just to sleep.’

She bowed. ‘If he ask you – you tell him I said you can have me.’

‘I’ll tell him you were very, er, generous,’ John corrected himself. ‘Obedient.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said dully. ‘I am obedient.’

In the morning Sir Henry was in a better temper. Over breakfast he asked John about his own garden and about the treasures of the Ark. ‘I could send you some things,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Things I pick up here. If you like savage things.’

‘I do,’ John said. ‘I do indeed. And if there are any plants from England that you desire I could send them out to you. You could grow vines here very well, I would have thought.’

‘Could you take a note of credit for me and buy some carpets for me?’ Sir Henry asked. ‘I want some Turkey carpets for the hall.’

‘I should be delighted to do so,’ John said. ‘And anything else you require.’